Cercles
Occasional Papers Series
(2009)
“THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE”
Poem analysis
Stéphanie NOIRARD
Université Jean Moulin – Lyon 3
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones 5
Are nine-and-fifty swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount 10
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight, 15
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold 20
Stéphanie Noirard, “ ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’: Poem analysis”, Cercles, Occasional
Papers Series (2009), 233-241.
Cercles / 234
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water, 25
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool ->
Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away? 30
**** During a talk about rhythm in his poetry, Yeats jokingly declared: “It gave
me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I am going to
read and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose!” And
although this applied to poems included in Inisfree, it may well be applied to
“Wild Swans at Coole” whose rhythm is at the same time in and out of
control, hence revealing the transitional state in which the poet and his art
find themselves.
For indeed, while the poem could easily be taken for a traditionally
romantic piece, its unsurprising focus on the poet and his art that turns into
a disquieting self-questioning, soon leads, through a reflection upon death,
to mysticism and modern writing.
I. A traditional romantic poem Apart from the reference to the swans which harks back to Yeats’s personal
mythological archetypes, it is, at first, difficult to spot what is particularly
Yeatsian, let alone Irish about this poem. In fact, thematically it sounds
rather closer to a 19th century English piece about loneliness, nature and the
self.
Among all places, it is upon the shores of a lake, just as the Lakists or
Lamartine would, that the persona finds himself to meditate on his
loneliness. This is made powerful with the word “companionable” applied
Stéphanie Noirard /235
to the streams and swans but never to man or the persona who only appears
on line seven, not as subject but as an object pronoun. Moreover, the last line
and the very last word of the poem, ‘away,’ emphasise the poet’s face-to-face
encounter with nature. Transfiguration is indeed part of the poem as the
enfolding of the persona’s and the swans’ lives are soon made one and the
same. For the swans are anthropomorphised as unwearied, passionate,
conquering young folks “paddl[ing] lover by lover,” thus reminding the
persona of his own youth, when he “[t]rod with a lighter tread.” By contrast,
the ageing poet may be said to identify with the fifty-ninth swan, allegedly
the only one that has no lover and is dejected.
Such a situation tends to place the poet in direct line with Lord
Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott.” Isolated in her tower, the lady only looks
at the world through a mirror in which she sees the “knights come riding
two and two.” Only when her eyes fall upon Lancelot, riding alone on an
autumn day, does she dare to look out her window, which causes her web to
fly out and the mirror to shatter. She is then confronted to her intense feeling
of isolation and her own mortality. In that light, it is no coincidence that the
persona should see “nine-and-fifty”—as opposed to fifty-eight—swans and
that the reality he experiences after they have “scatter[red] wheeling in great
broken rings” should make his heart feel “sore.” It should also be noted that
the tower is a haunting theme in Yeats’s poetry. Finally, another feature
“The Wild Swans at Coole” has in common with Tennyson’s poem is the use
of classical formulas bordering on archaism. In “The Lady of Shalott,” they
are meant to better conjure up the Arthurian world and consist in the use of
numerous hyperbatons or of compound adjectives such as “many-towered
Camelot.” In Yeats’s poem, they consist in the use of faded emphatic phrases
such as “I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,” or the Middle
English way of counting “nine-and-fifty swans.” These techniques tend to
reinforce the persona’s loneliness as they place him even further apart from
men and as a consequence, probably exacerbate his communion with nature.
Despite these overused descriptions, the landscape is richly described
through the lexical fields of colour and light (the October twilight, mirror),
sound (clamorous, bell-beat of their wings) and movement (brimming,
mount, scatter), which provide a vivid experience of the landscape
throughout the stanzas. This is particularly evident as far as sounds are
concerned since a flight of swans is particularly "clamorous", which is
rendered through an accumulation of plosives imitating the violent flapping
of wings when the swans appear. Afterwards, when they are out of sight,
everything is hushed once more and only a faint fluttering movement may
be heard through fricatives and sonorant glides.
As far as the rich landscape is concerned, the poem is an evocation
of autumn which is irresistibly reminiscent of Keats’s “Season of mist and
mellow fruitfulness.” All the more so as the first two lines are of an extreme
regularity:
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The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Both are iambic lines, the first a tetrameter the other a trimeter. And the first
line contains an instance of promotion, a classical way of creating an
artificial yet perfectly acceptable iambic rhythm by placing a beat on a
usually unstressed word, the preposition “in.” More than half of the lines
follow these iambic rules, and some, like line 18 are eventually made regular
by the double offbeat which compensates for the initial inversion (i.e. beat
falling upon the first word.) And on the other hand, the irregularity of the
remaining lines may be interpreted as following the romantic rules of
emancipation from classical iambic poetry.
Similarly, the nature theme is emancipated from the classical vision of
art which relied on imitation, and Nature becomes a pretext for or at least a
symbol of meditation. Like Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” the poem is
an ode to the swans which become this “invisible influence, like an
inconstant wind” which “awakens to transitory brightness the mind in
creation,” this “fading coal.” So that the swans become the symbols of a
tyrannical muse: like her they are wild and free and “wander where they
will.” This is emphasised by the fact that the phrase is an apposition and is
part of the trochaic rhythm of the line hence attracting both the eye and the
ear.
As a result of this free wandering, inspiration may either dictate her words to the poet (“The bell‐beat of their wings above my head,”) and this is done in an imperative, “clamorous” manner as implied by the accumulation of plosives (B and T) which may evoke the violent process the poet has to undergo in order to write under the command of the muse, along with the difficulty of writing: indeed, in plosives, air is first retained then sharply released just as a hesitating pen may splutter ink on the page. On the other hand, inspiration may be altogether absent as the swans will: Delight [other] men’s eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away
Again we come back to the notion of loneliness here, but this notion is
better understood as we come to realise that to be lonely, for a poet, is to see
his muse fly away and to awake to the world of men. The poet’s fall to a
state of imperfect humanity is revealed in the apocopated rhyme of the aicill
“awake away.”
This is reinforced by the anapaestic rhythm of “they have flown
away” which creates suspense in that it delays the result of the actual
finding, but more importantly reflects the poet’s pondering thoughts since
Stéphanie Noirard /237
an accumulation of unstressed syllables may be interpreted as a mumbling
to oneself as though the poet had altogether forgotten to read aloud. All the
more so as the succession of /f/ and /v/, two fricatives with a similar
articulation place, trigger “have” to merge into “flown,” thus creating a
whispering effect. These whispered thoughts are centred on the role of the
poet and his poetry.
II. The poet and his art There is, in the poem, a clear distinction between the poetic ‘I’, often
promoted though appearing only on line eight, and "men" which appears
only once to be demoted on the spot. This places the poet in a state of
aloofness which is not unlike the position of the swans flying above the
persona. Here, the persona takes on his position as a poet prophet who is
invested with a mission to enlighten his readers.
In that light, it could be argued that the swans here in fact symbolise
the poems which the persona releases and delivers to the world, to “men’s
eyes.” They emanate from him and drift on the water, a symbol of time, with
a forward movement impelled by the impetus of the poem which alternates
regular and irregular, rhymed and unrhymed lines. Finally, the movement is
integrated into space and time owing to the last rhyming pair, “day” /
“away.” This means that while the poet is sorry to let his words go (“my
heart is sore.”) he nevertheless notes and then hopes that his poetry lasts in
time: the 19 autumns being the first 19 years since 1900. What is this message
which the poet is so impatient to pass on?
The poem actually deceives expectancy as it denies the reader the
Irish themes and mythological references he would automatically be looking
for in a poem by Yeats. Of course, Coole refers to Lady Gregory’s house,
Coole Park, and probably calls to mind her writings of folk tales. The
introductory description of landscape could also conjure up a cliché Emerald
Isle with untouched lakes and woods and wild life. One could also go so far
as to interpret the swans as a tribute to the Irish who struggled for the
independence of their country, all the more so as the poem was published
only two years after the Easter Rising. Going on with the Irish theme, and
knowing that swans are migrating birds, it could easily be inferred that the
poem is a tribute to all the Irish emigrants who left their land during the
Potato Famine in the mid-nineteenth century. The spondees in the poem
would thus sound like a gloomy tolling bell in the memory of a famished
population in a dying country. This interpretation would also account for
the poet’s worried questions “among what rushes will they build / By what
lake’s edge or pool?” Finally, the reference to the swans might also be
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regarded as evoking a Gaelic song ‘The White Swan’, written by Domhnall
Ruadh Choruna as a tribute to his lover before he went to war.
But although, or perhaps because Yeats insisted so much on his
mission as a guardian of the history and traditions of his country, it may be
felt that the above conjectures could be made haphazardly and without real
justification. The Irishness of the poem is rather to be found in its prosody.
Indeed, several features of Gaelic poetry may be found here such as the
reliance on assonances (/eI/ /I/) and alliterations (/s/, /t/, /b/); on the
repetition of words (upon, still); on word ladders (“ring-wing,” “countmount,” “stone-swan”); or on aicill, a process by which a word inside a line
is made to rhyme with the last line of another (“awake”/”away”).
The poet, however does not seem to be entirely convinced by his own
influence. This may be inferred from Yeats’s biography since he was notably
sceptical about his people’s ability to understand intellectual matters. Still
this can also be proved within the poem itself. The fact that the swanspoems are described as “drifting” is a first clue leading to the idea that the
poet’s words go astray. Moreover, the repetition of the term “still,” though
sometimes the adverb is used instead of the adjective, emphasises this
paralysis which both Yeats and Joyce considered to be the scourge of
Ireland. So that the poet eventually wonders whether his message will be
heard:
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
The references to rushes where they are bound to get entangled and lost and
the passage from lake to the stagnant waters of a pool brings a dreary
prospect as to the poems’ fates.
Not being heard means death for a poet all the more so as, to refer
back to a romantic concept, the work of an author is a edifice that protects
him from the worse death of all, oblivion. And perhaps it is this thought of
death which, associated to a faltering rhythm, gives the poem its disquieting
feeling.
III. A disquieting feeling The notion of death is everywhere in the poem and is defused through the
usual archetypes of water which symbolises the passing of time and of
autumn, the last season before winter or death, hence old age. And this is
reinforced by the persona’s musing on his getting old and the years that had
gone by, or flown by without his noticing it, which is perhaps not so
surprising since Yeats was in his fifties when this poem was published and
Stéphanie Noirard /239
could be said to have, by then, entered what psychoanalysts call mid-life
crisis.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Lack of control is evident here as the persona is first introduced as an object,
me, who is acted upon rather than independent. And when he finally
becomes a subject, his actions are immediately rustrated “before I had well
finished.” And things escape him “suddenly scatter in broken rings.” The
slowing down of rhythm of these lines too enhances death: the only regular
iambic line (“since I first made my count”) belongs to the past, while the
present is described through anapaests that create suspense (“The
nineteenth autumn has come upon me”) and spondees (“All suddenly
mount” / “great broken”) that prevent a forward motion and become
synonymous with death when associated to the idea of stillness. But the
persona is going to react strongly against this and will finally turn his
anguish into a mystical experience.
It would be unfair to say that there is a degradation of rhythm and a
gradual dislocation of the lines in this poem but it must be admitted that
rhythm is rather inconsistent here as it is never following any predictable
pattern although admittedly never merging into, say, prose for instance. But
because promotion and initial inversions are synonymous with unusual
rhythm, contrasting with the expected iambic flow of the English language,
the fact that the very first line contains a promotion and the subsequent
trochaic rhythm are symptomatic of disturbing thoughts entering the poet’s
mind and destabilising the writing flow in a sort of stammering, reinforced
by the constant repetition of words (still, upon, first). Stammering is also
enhanced by the word ladder “ring / wing” happening at the very moment
when the persona seems to lose control over the swans, and the enjambment
“They paddle in the cold / Companionable streams” where the beat on
“pa” recalling that on “paddle” and the three unstressed syllables
“nionable” make the stuttering sound “cold-com” all the more resounding.
Moreover, this is further reinforced by the following repetition “air / their,”
both accentuated since “their” is emphasised here as opposed to “my heart.”
Enjambments and the succession of similar sounds reveal a wish to
prevent blanks or silence from insinuating into the line, and this filling of
space with sound is precisely what stammering does too. So, in a way,
anguish is not allowed to settle down and death is adjourned. This is what,
according to Heidegger, is happening when the da-sein, or being, becomes
aware of its presence to the world. Death is first looked upon as
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unsurprising and usual yet discarded as happening to others. It is worrying
about it and trying to fend it off that makes the da-sein aware of his being-inthe-world when he envisages that he may no longer be. This newly achieved
awareness, this presence of the self in the world is perhaps exemplified
through the passage from “me” to a promoted “I” (“since I first made”)
transposed into “my” and then repeated eight times throughout the poem
and even more if we take into account the numerous assonances in /aɪ/ that
echo it. So that once dying has been accepted as the quintessential part of
being-in-the-world and once the da-sein is aware of this presence, the
persona may be able to turn to more metaphysical and spiritual thoughts.
According to the Celtic tradition, October is the month of ivy, an
evergreen tree that represents the perennial aspect of the human psyche.
Moreover, in India, a country whose culture Yeats was much interested in,
/Hamsa/, swan, represents man’s migrating soul. So that death no longer is
a disquieting subject but becomes the end, according to the word of Tagore,
of “a vast cycle moving among stars.” In that sense, it is perhaps no
coincidence that the persona should describe himself as being asleep, that is
a transitional state in which a living man may experience after-life.
Hence the last two lines are not to be read as nostalgic regret but as an
awareness that one has to renounce what “delights men’s eyes” for “[w]hen
we look at the world through the veil of our desires we make it small and
narrow, and fail to perceive its full truth.” A full truth which is to be found
in the harmony which ensues from the union of opposites in the world. The
union is made mostly evident in the first stanza where the three elements of
earth (stone), water and air, represented by the swans, are gathered in the
harmony of a perfect iambic rhythm, and where water and sky are made one
and the same through a mirroring effect reinforced by an enjambment which
also is a reconciliation of a sort since it unites prosody and orality, if not that
of prose, at least that of songs.
For the poem too is a part of the universe and it would not be
unreasonable to infer that it is the opposition between regularity and
irregularity which gives it its harmony and unison. And this is directly
inscribed in Tagore’s philosophy:
Our life, like a river, strikes its banks not to find itself closed in by
them, but to realise anew every moment that it has its unending
opening towards the sea. It is a poem that strikes its metre at every
step not to be silenced by its rigid regulations, but to give expression
every moment to the inner freedom of its harmony.
So that it may finally be argued that just like its uneven rhythm the poem is
hesitating between romanticism and modernity, a poet historian who passes
on tradition and a poet prophet who realises he belongs to the world and
claims harmony and oneness with it. This transitional crisis, in fact, is a
strategy of self-discovery through writing. Indeed, as H. Meschonnic has it,
Stéphanie Noirard /241
Si le sens est une activité du sujet, si le rythme est une organisation du
sens dans le discours, le rythme est nécessairement une organisation
ou configuration du sujet dans son discours.
It is also a configuration of the subject and its writing into an ever-changing
world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY GREENING, John. W.B. Yeats. London: Greenwich Exchange, literary series, 2005. HEIDEGGER, Martin. F. Vezin. Trad. Être et le temps. Paris : NRF Gallimard, 1986. KERBRAT‐ORECCHIONI, Catherine. L’Énonciation de la subjectivité dans le langage. Paris : A. Colin, 2006. LEECH, Geoffrey. A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry. London: Longman, 1969. MESCHONNIC, Henri. Critique du Rythme. Anthropologie historique du langage. Lagrasse : Verdier, 1982. O’NEILL, Michael. The Poems of W. B. Yeats. London: Routledge, 2004. SHELLEY, P. B. Defence of Poetry. Online text. University of Toronto Libraries, Web Development Group, 2004. TAGORE, Rabindranath. Sadhana, The realisation of Life. Online text. Project Gutenberg, 2004. WIEDER, Catherine. Éléments de psychanalyse pour le texte littéraire. Paris : Bordas, 1988. YEATS, W.B. Selected Poems. John Kelly. Ed. London: Everyman’s Poetry, 1997.